Westworld episode one review

Westworld lives somewhere in our future and our past. A theme park where visitors pay good money to have their every whim played out by animatronic host.

Westworld is a sequel to the 1970s film of the same name, I say this because of the several references to the incidents that happened thirty years ago.

The park is overseen by a hunger-games looking building where robots are kept and updated. We arrive in time for their latest update and Dr. Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins) keeps trying to make things a little more realistic.

We follow Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) a peaceful girl who lives with her mother and father who enjoys painting and Teddy (James Marsden) a quiet cowboy who meets her on a chance encounter, the two spend a magical day together only for Dolores’ parents to be brutally murdered by bandits. Ed Harris character shows us, murders Teddy and rapes Dolores.

Known as “The Man in Black” and described by the show runner as a ‘Grand Theft Auto” character the change in the way the guests are portrayed as ugly interlopers on the robots rich inner lives. From the way that they were portrayed in the original movie we don’t find ourselves rooting for the guests, possibly as a reflection of the way video games have developed into something slightly more gruesome then their 70s counterparts.

We see the mundanities of running a robot theme-park as robots begin to malfunction the storylines have to be changed and we see the tentative balance the world lives in. Revealing a malfunctioning gang of robots. Dolores father discovers a discarded picture from one of the guests and begins to question his entire existence and begins to remember pieces from his previous incarnation.

Episode one of Westworld was solid, a beautifully shot wonder with a couple of story issues and a stellar cast. How it will go into a seven season show remains to be seen as they exhaust the malfunctioning robot storyline but we’re looking forward to it.